"I been out with a lot of white birds," Samad Iqbal's fellow waiter, Shiva, tells him. "But never an English girl. Never works. Never." Samad, on the brink of an affair with his children's art teacher, Poppy, asks why. "'Too much history,' was Shiva's enigmatic answer ... 'Too much bloody history.'" Sixty pages later, Samad has begun the affair with Poppy and ended it, to her bitterness and anger. Shiva is vindicated. "Too much history there, man. You see: it ain't just you she's angry with, is it?" Shiva, recently embarked on an Open University course, elucidates: "It's all brown man leaving English woman, it's all Nehru saying See-Ya to Madam Britannia.'"

White Teeth is all about history yet runs a nice line in mockery at the expense of those (teaching university courses?) who would believe that history inescapably shapes every human exchange. It is like many canonical English novels in its attitude to history, which is alternately earnest and mocking. You need to understand history to know how Smith's assorted characters get to Cricklewood at the end of the 20th century. But you cannot help noticing that the characters themselves creatively forget history, when they are not making themselves absurd by solemnly invoking it.

One aspect of Smith's blithe audacity is that she incorporates in her novel two different kinds of historical time that have usually been found in two different species of English novel. First, there is what we might call "recent history". We begin in 1974 and approach the time of the book's composition through episodes in the 1980s and early 90s. In the TV version, these periods are insistently with us, via the lovingly recreated fashions and the ever-present pop soundtrack (no TV director can resist this glib shorthand for historical specificity). Second, there is far-away history: events in the Balkans in 1945, in the West Indies in 1907, in India in 1857. All these summon up the consequences of grand historical events: war, earthquake and mutiny, distantly, perhaps invisibly, shaping the lives of Smith's characters.

Victorian novelists specialised in the first kind of history, discovering the benefits of fixing the action of a novel back just beyond the horizon, perhaps 30 or 40 years before the date of publication. Novels such as Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, which we think of as quintessentially Victorian, are all actually historical novels, which took their first readers back several decades to a recently lost time. Thus you showed how your society was made. Paradoxically, for many British novelists, writing about "the way we live now" has invariably meant reaching back into the past so we are allowed to see that odd, singular individuals are acting from motives that have some larger significance.

There is also long-ago history. Novelists' evocation of this past has often been enjoyable for its own sake. Some such fiction (Sir Walter Scott, I, Claudius, Georgette Heyer) is rather looked down on, even though, as in these cases, it might skilfully convey considerable historical knowledge. Smith's forays into colonial history no doubt required research too, but they are awkward for structural reasons. She introduces her stories of Clara's mixed-race ancestry in Edwardian Jamaica, for instance, with a sudden digression from the name of the comprehensive school that her daughter attends ("A more thorough investigation in the archives of the local Grange Library would reveal ..."). Back a century we go.

The novel's sense of an ending depends on another piece of history: a secret about the Holocaust. The scientist who has made Marcus Chalfen's scientific innovations possible is the reputed Nazi war criminal whom Archie declined to execute almost half a century earlier. We have been told (apparently in Smith's own voice) that immigrants "cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow", yet, like the fleeing mouse at the novel's end, every one seems to be escaping the past. White Teeth sometimes creaks as it strives to accommodate all that history, but, with a heady pleasure in the prerogatives of fiction, it does so in order to leave history behind.

#&183; John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London. Read his archived pieces and have your say about White Teeth at www.theguardian.com/books or write to The Review, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER.